Wednesday, 23 September 2015

Looking Out My Window - At Work

Those of you who have been reading this blog since it began may remember when I went to the David Hockney exhibition and came back all inspired. The result was a series of paintings of the view from my window, watching the change of the seasons through Autumn and Winter. Well, not so long ago I went to the Sonia Delaunay exhibition at the Tate Modern and these paintings are the result of that visit. It was a fascinating exhibition to walk round and I loved watching how her work evolved from her early portraits through to fabric design and fashion. She was a talented and versatile artist and I particularly liked the bold colours.

So taking inspiration from this, I used the view of London as seen from my desk at work to get some practice in. I would like to add a disclaimer at this point just in case my boss is reading - these pictures are based on a quick post-it note sketch and I haven't been wasting away hours at work secretly producing artwork when I was supposed to be doing the budget.

This is not a style of painting I've done before so this was a bit of an experiment. I started by drawing out the buildings and the river then used the shapes I'd created to extend the blocks of colour into the sky. Delaunay probably abstracted some of her images more than I have but these are ultimately Keeley paintings. The colours themselves were just colours that took my fancy and I didn't give much thought as to what went where as I started out. This was deliberate. I needed to be producing something in order to decide what it was I wanted to produce. As I worked, I started to get a better idea in my head of what I wanted and that's where version two comes in. I limited the palette more for this one and out more thought into what went where. I like both paintings but I was happier with my approach to the second one because I felt like I put more thought into it. It's probably not going to come as much of a surprise that I finished that second picture with a bundle of ideas of things I want to do next. So although this is a deviation from my normal style of painting, watch this space for more to come.